As any Armando Iannucci fans will tell you, the trailer for new comedy series Veep bore more than a passing resemblance to a stateside version of The Thick Of It.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – Iannucci (and fellow Veep writers Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell) have already successfully taken the The Thick Of It’s scabrous brand of politcal satire trans-atlantic with feature film In The Loop.

And if In The Loop passed the proverbial baton from London’s Whitehall to Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill, then Veep has taken it on and set off at a pretty promising pace.

Which is not to say that it looks like a winner right from the start – there was a huge Malcolm Tucker-shaped hole throughout the entire episode, with the art of swearing that everybody’s favourite fictional spin-doctor took to Olympian levels being sorely missed.

In its place, the fuckity fucking fucks dropped by the cast sometimes came across as forced, as if they were trying to channel the spirit of Tucker without the aid of a professional séance.

But this is being particularly nit-picky – forced swearing aside, the show was almost pitch perfect at projecting the low-level political lunacy that underscored The Thick Of It.

As Vice-President Selina Mayer, Julia Louis Dreyfus (who we will no longer refer as Seinfeld‘s Elaine Benes) used the full range of deadpan ticks, stutters and pregnant pauses to express the frustrations of the office, turning up to a committee function to find just “three people and a fuck-load of quiche”, being ignored by people taking phone calls or typing at their computers and coming into conflict with big oil over a hapless initiative to introduce cornstarch cutlery to government canteens.

The tensions that are set to simmer throughout the show’s run – between Anna Clumsky’s embattled chief of staff and Dan Egan’s devious deputy assistant, and between Timothy C. Simons’  slimy White House liaison and pretty much everybody on the Vice-Presidential team – were set up nicely, and Veep looks like it will be worthy of our viewing time, especially with the knowledge that satirical god Chris Morris has directed some of the forthcoming episodes.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, all it needs now is a Malcolm Tucker-like figure to put the fear of god into everybody who comes within swearing distance.

Viewers in the US (and anyone in any country who downloads this VPN) can watch the first episode on YouTube here. Otherwise Veep is on HBO in the US at 10pm on Sundays, while the UK sits and waits for it to start on Sky Atlantic in June.